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Sharing full resolution photos

I share a lot of photos with my girlfriend, friends and family. I use to use shared photo streams until I realized that photos were re-scaled to a lower resolution. I have then used a mix of dropbox, google drive and air drop to share pictures as I cannot compromise on quality. However, when iCloud Drive and then Photos and iCloud Photo Sharing were released, I thought I would finally be able to go back to an Apple solution. However, I have just realized to my complete disbelief that iCloud Photo Sharing also re-scale photos to a lower resolution (max 2048 pixels on the long end). While I understand the limitation for people getting the service for free, I am a paying iCloud Drive customers and I cannot for the life of me understand why Apple, especially with its focus on retina display, doesn't offer a way to share full resolution pictures (which would likely use my iCloud Drive storage). I know I am not the only one bothered by this so does anyone has any idea how to fix this other than going back to using (better) cloud service like Dropbox or GDrive?

iPhoto '11, OS X Mavericks (10.9.3)

Posted on May 13, 2015 12:20 PM

Best reply

LarryHN

Level 10

106,110 points

Posted on Feb 12, 2017 2:25 PM

There is no issue to resolve - iCloud Photos sharing is not advertised to nor is it designed to share large resolution photos - it is designed to share max 2048 pixel on the on dimension photos and that is exactly what it does - iCloud Photo Sharing - Apple Support

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40 replies

averynkh

Level 1

21 points

Jun 10, 2016 8:42 AM in response to alexhenry2006

i just noticed this too!!!!

i am really ****** of Apple sometimes, at least let us to choose to keep them full resolution or downscale right???

nowadays everyone has wifi at home, why cant we keep the original full resolution!!!!!!!

i thought photos inside iCloud Photo Sharing are full resolution until just now..

indeed what the fxxx is apple doing!!

Yer_Man

Level 10

162,396 points

Jun 10, 2016 8:49 AM in response to averynkh

Photos - like iPhoto and Aperture - does preserve your original.

I've no idea how you know the set up in everybody's homes.

Sep 12, 2016 11:02 AM in response to alexhenry2006

Don't know if you ever resolved this, but I was looking into this myself and found your question, and Apple's answer on keeping the original resolution of photos here:

iCloud Photo Library - Apple Support

Note in the paragraph on saving space on your phone, it shows that you can set it to save it as the original, the issue however is, others you share it with will also have to have it set like that, otherwise when they see it on their phone it will make it "optimized" (i.e. 2048 on the long end)... hope that helps... 🙂

léonie

Level 10

195,019 points

Sep 12, 2016 11:16 AM in response to TekWarrior

It is a bit of a confusion in this discussion. iCloud has different services. This discussion is about Shared albums, previously known as Shared Photo Streams. Photos in Shared albums will be limited to 2048 pixels on the long edge, unless they are panoramic.

iCloud Photo Library will store the originals at the full resolution, but is not meant for sharing photos.

And some photos in this discussion lost the full resolution by dragging them from the Photos Library browser to a folder. This will only save previews.